


Try

by HoneyBeeez



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: (ah! also rated for the swearing/language i guess!), (not really a twist but i think its pretty funny), College AU, M/M, Roommates, an AU where Hinata stopped playing colleyball after middle school and focused on academia instead, people believing in hinata when he doesnt believe in himself is kinda what i live on, self doubt, twist ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-30
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-17 04:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5854954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoneyBeeez/pseuds/HoneyBeeez
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Hinata's defeat in middle school, he decides to stop playing volleyball altogether. He gets his head out of the game and into the books, and graduates the top of his class. College brings him new challenges, especially his roommate, who he figures out is new to the living-together situation, and not-so-new to Hinata's life.</p>
<p>~Or, as i like to call this "Try, by Ennoshita-senpai"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Try

**Author's Note:**

> hello all! this was written for my good friend blitzboy004 on tumblr, and i originally posted it there! i thought it would be cool if i posted it here, too! so enjoy!!

There’s days he regrets it, not playing volleyball. There’s days where he’s staring at his bedroom ceiling and asking himself, “ _Why?_ ”

An answer always comes to him, though, no matter how much he insists to himself that it’s a rhetorical question. Sometimes the answer is because he was too scared to put himself out there again, other times it’s because he’s no good, anyways. But he knows, somewhere deep, deep down inside, that he could have been good, he could have been _great_ , if he tried. But it was scary, maybe a bit _too_ scary, because for the majority of middle school he had no one beside him, no one to toss for him, and no one would stick around long enough to help him get better.

The fear bloomed deep inside his gut after losing bitterly in his first, and last, match ever, and it hadn’t really left him since.

He decided to go to Karasuno because of their reputation they had with volleyball before, but the fear carried him into high school. The fear stunted him, stopped him from walking into the gym after the first day of school, made him turn away from the steady _thump, thump_ of a volleyball on the lacquered floor, and drove him home.

He tried forgetting, tried to focus on his grades, and somewhere around his second year at Karasuno, it started working. He stopped lingering around the gym when practice started, stopped wanting to sit in on their home games, and actually got good grades for once. Of course, he was just as happy as everyone else was when there was news that the volleyball team was doing better than they were before, but there was a pain in his chest whenever he heard of another victory.

He pushed it out of his head, well, more like shoved it out, and focused on what was in front of him. He pushed himself in a way he didn’t know he could, to the point where he ended up graduating from Karasuno at the top of his class.

* * *

His first day at university has him walking on campus with a bounce in his step that makes you think he’s as light as air. He walks into the admissions office, gets his schedule, room key, and a packet of everything he might possibly need or need to know while attending, and he graciously takes them and finds his way to his dorm.

He fumbles with the key, trying hard to figure out which way it has to go, which way he needs to turn the door knob, but a shout startles him before he can successfully figure it out.

“THE DOOR’S OPEN!”

Hinata wants to smack himself in the face, and opens the door grandly.

“Sorry about that, I thought no one else was here!” Hinata says cheerily, stepping into the room and giving his roommate a winning smile. He opens his eyes, and finds that he can only see his roommate’s back but  _holy hell, he’s tall_. And he’s already putting his things onto the mattress at the bottom of the bunk bed. “HEY! What if I wanted the bottom bunk?!” He screeches, not exactly mad, but just a little irritated that this guy would just go ahead and make important decisions without him.

“Well, maybe you should have gotten here earlier-!” his roommate barks back, turning around to give him a hard look. But his voice dies in his throat and his tense expression melts into something softer just as Hinata thinks, ‘ _Whoa, he’s attractive_.’ And then he’s just confused, because he was sure he saw this tall, black-haired, blue-eyed boy before…

“You,” his roommate says lightly, almost shocked to see him.

“What?!” Hinata demands, his voice a little higher because of uncertainty. Well, its not his fault! This guy was the one staring at him like he’s a ghost, and its unnerving!

“I know you. We went to the same high school,” his roommate remarks, dropping his things onto the bunk and takes a step closer to him. Hinata tenses up, and shoots him a glare.

“How do you know that? I’ve never seen you a day in my life!” Hinata lies, not wanting to admit that he looked familiar, because that would mean this guy was right, right?.

“You made that stupid little speech at the graduation ceremony about new beginning and leaps and bounds and some shit,” his roommate says, smirking horrifyingly as he does so.

“H-Hey, I worked hard on that speech!” Hinata concedes, because there’s no denying that they went to the same school now. There’s a chuckle, and suddenly a hand outstretched towards him.

“Kageyama Tobio,” his roommate says. “Nice to meet you, nerd.”

“Hinata Shouyo,” Hinata replies, grabbing onto his hand and shaking it stiffly (really, it looks more like an acceptance to a challenge than anything else). “And I am not a nerd, you insufferable giant!”

“Says the guy who uses ‘insufferable’ in a conversation,” Kageyama remarks with another annoying chuckle, and it’s really getting on Hinata’s nerves.

“Whatever!” he spits back intelligently, darting past Kageyama and plopping himself down onto the bottom bunk, careful not to squish whatever he had on there already, because he wasn’t _that_ much of a jerk.

“What are you doing, dumbass?” Kageyama barks, and Hinata gives him a taste of his own medicine as he smirks.

“This is my bed now, since you’re being so mean to me,” Hinata says, sticking his tongue out at him.

“Get off.”

“Nope.”

“Get. Off. My. Bed.”

“It’s not yours anymore!”

“GET OFF!”

“Oof!”

‘ _Oh yeah, this year is going to be a blast_ ,’ Hinata thinks as he finds himself in a headlock, courtesy of none other than his roommate.

* * *

Everything starts out pretty rough. There’s a clash of schedules that leads to a medley of alarms and complaints (mostly from Hinata, because over the years, he practically conditioned himself to be a light sleeper, but Kageyama? He could sleep through an earthquake, tsunami, and a dozen small house fires all in one go). There’s a couple squabbles over space and territory (because Kageyama takes up _so much space_ when all he needs to do is be a little more organized, goddammit).

Hinata finds himself lucky that Kageyama’s gone most afternoons. Well… now he sounds a bit like the asshole Kageyama claims he is, but it’s true. He has time, he has silence, and he get through all the homework he assigns himself to keep on track in his classes.

It also gives him a little time to organize their room, which might seem a little creepy but… he’s not snooping, or trying to find out some juicy gossip or whatever, so he thinks its fine. Plus, Kageyama never notices how his drawers seem to pull out with ease lately or how his bed is always somehow made by the time he gets back from… whatever he’s doing.

It doesn’t take long for Hinata to find the first straw that breaks the camel’s back. He’s going through laundry, just about to hike the basket onto his hip and trudge it downstairs to the washroom when he finds it: a volleyball jersey. He blinks, almost in disbelief, and suddenly all the pieces fit.

‘ _He plays volleyball_ ,’ he thinks to himself as he sits on his top bunk after putting in the laundry. ‘ _I could have met him earlier, I could have known him… everything could have been so much different_ …’

“I’m back…” Kageyama calls, opening the door and stepping quickly inside their room. Hinata jerks, and before he even knows it, he’s catapulting himself off his bed, landing on the floor a bit clumsily, and pointing at Kageyama accusingly.

“You never told me you played volleyball!” he shrieks, meeting Kageyama’s confused expression with disbelief.

“I thought you knew, dumbass!” his roommate yells back, tossing his gym bag onto his bed and taking up a defensive stance.

“Well, how am I supposed to know if you never told me?” Hinata questions.

“Because we went to the same high school! I thought you knew I was on the team then, too!” Kageyama says, and that shuts Hinata down pretty quickly. His annoyance melts, and his argument shatters on the floor. He spent so much time trying to push away volleyball that he completely forgot about the _actual people_ playing it. “Oh my god,” Kageyama mutters.

“What?”

“You didn’t know I was on the volleyball team at Karasuno,” Kageyama says. “I’ve only been on it all three years!”

“I’m sorry!” Hinata says, huffing because he doesn’t want to talk about this anymore, doesn’t want to talk about _volleyball_ anymore. “I’m sorry I brought it up,” he says, mostly to himself as he turns to go back up to his bed.

“Why does it bother you so much, anyways?” Kageyama asks, and Hinata feels himself freeze right in his tracks. “Hinata?” He hears Kageyama question, and he balls his hands into fists, because he can’t believe he’s actually going to answer him, he can’t believe he’s going to talk about it…

“I… used to love volleyball,” Hinata admits, and he tries so hard to not let his head hang as he climbs onto his bed. He sits cross-legged and pulls one of his three blankets onto his lap, fighting off the feeling of curling under it and never coming back up. “There wasn’t a boys’ team at my middle school, and none of my friends wanted to play with me so I played on my own. And finally… I convinced my friends to come with me to compete in a tournament and… we were crushed. And I figured that I wasn’t good enough, no matter how high I jumped, no matter how hard I tried, so I just… quit.”

“You… That was you!” Kageyama exclaims, and the phrase sounds so familiar that Hinata doesn’t even look up. Well, he doesn’t want to, not until Kageyama’s face is in his, and it takes him a moment to figure out that he’s standing on the edge of his own bed to get up this high. “That was my team you played against! I _knew_ I knew you from somewhere else!” Kageyama says, reaching out and grabbing Hinata by the collar, shaking him a couple times.

“Hey, lemme go!” Hinata says, prying his long fingers off him and scooting towards the wall behind him. “Woop de doo, it’s just another reason for me to hate-”

“I thought you had potential,” Kageyama says, stepping down and sitting on the bed he was previously standing on. Hinata blinks, and just as he opens his mouth, Kageyama continues. “You were a natural at spiking, and you were crazy fast. You just needed to practice, and you would have turned out to be a good player.”

_A good player._

_Potential._

_A natural._

“Shut up, dumbass. It’s too late now, isn’t it?” Hinata says, ending the conversation, even though his roommate’s words were bouncing in his head.

Later that night, he wonders why he didn’t remember Kageyama in the first place. Then it hits him: he was successful with his quest to forget about volleyball, and totally forgot about the details of those afternoons setting and spiking to walls, and of the match that changed it all.

He dreams about joining the volleyball team in high school, and he wakes up to Kageyama’s stupid alarm and bags underneath his eyes.

They should have been good dreams, but instead they were nightmares.

* * *

“Get ready, dumbass,” Kageyama says lightly, throwing something soft at Hinata’s face. Hinata groans, smacking whatever it is off of him and rolling over onto his side.

It’s Saturday, the only day of the week that Hinata lets himself sleep in. Kageyama knows this, and yet he’s being an asshole.

“You wanna go for a run or not?” Kageyama questions in that no-bullshit tone of voice that Hinata’s gotten so used to during these past couple weeks.

Hinata finds himself more awake than he was before, brightened at the prospect of a run. He groans again, this time sitting up and rubbing at his eyes. He looks at what Kageyama threw at him, and finds that it’s a pair of basketball shorts.

“These aren’t mine,” he says, blinking, because he hasn’t owned a pair of basketball shorts since he gave up on volleyball altogether.

“They’re mine, and too small for me. I thought they would fit you rather than wearing that ridiculous pair of sweatpants you have,” Kageyama says, a small smirk on his face. Hinata rolls his eyes.

“Fine, I guess I’ll go,” he says, pulling on the basketball shorts and hopping off his bed to find a shirt that he doesn’t mind sweating in. When he’s putting on his shoes, he realizes that Kageyama already dressed, and he could have gone without him if he wanted to. And that he’s staring at him getting ready, but Hinata brushes it off because there wasn’t much else to stare at in their little room, anyways.

The next couple minutes is spent by stretching, since Kageyama insists, and then they’re walking out of the dorm building and towards the road.

Once they start running, Hinata keeps up with Kageyama’s break-neck speed easily, and he sees why he was so adamant about stretching in the first place. Kageyama keeps on glancing at him, which is annoying, so Hinata pulls silly faces at him every time he catches him. Kageyama keeps running faster and faster, and Hinata keeps up effortlessly; the only reason why he doesn’t surge in front of him was because he doesn’t know where they are going in the first place and he doesn’t want to get Kageyama upset enough to ditch him in the middle of nowhere.

Kageyama finally stops them when they reach a particularly grassy part of campus. They’re both gasping for air, Kageyama with his hands on his knees and Hinata lying on his back in the grass, sweat dripping down their faces.

“I… knew it…” Kageyama huffs, still in the middle of getting his breath back.

“What?” Hinata breathes.

“That… you wouldn’t… _totally_ give up,” Kageyama says, that smirk on his face again that makes Hinata want to jump up and tackle him to the ground. “You still have that… crazy stamina… you had in middle school.”

“Why do you… care, anyways?” Hinata says, rolling to his knees and getting up. His legs feel like jelly, and standing upright makes him sway a bit, but he manages to stay on his feet.

“Because that means there’s still a chance,” his roommate says simply, and right then, Hinata is painfully reminded about how _tall_ he is.

“There’s _no chance_ , okay? I’m not going back to volleyball. I probably suck worse than I did in middle school,” Hinata says, glaring at Kageyama harshly.

“But you’re not even trying-!” Kageyama exclaims, balling his fists at his sides.

“What if I don’t want to try? Just leave it!” Hinata yells, getting into his roommate’s face as much as he can. “Don’t act like you’re doing me some favor, because you’re not! I _chose_ to not go back.”

“I’m not saying join a team, or compete, I’m just saying… _try_ ,” Kageyama says, taking a step away from him, and Hinata has to stare at him. He’s never backed down from a fight before, ever, and the fact that he’s backing down now makes Hinata wonder what he’s thinking. “You  _have_ potential. Don’t you ever wonder how far you could have gone if you didn’t give up?”

Hinata wanted to yell at him, scream at him, do practically anything other than tell him that that’s the only thing that haunts him. He can’t tell him that he’s right, he can’t admit that he misses the feeling of spiking the ball, or misses the adrenaline that came when he played that match and never came back.

“Just take me home,” Hinata says, looking away, and almost chokes because he said ‘ _home_ ,’ not ‘ _the room_.’ It felt… different, saying it.

“Nope,” Kageyama says simply.

“Hey-!”

“I have practice, and if you ever want to go home again, you’ll stay until practice is over,” Kageyama says, his hands on his hips, and Hinata has to glare again.

“You planned this, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, basically,” Kageyama says smugly. “C’mon, or I’m going to be late.”

* * *

And so, a couple minutes later, Hinata ends up sitting in a gym with nothing to do and more than a dozen people staring at him oddly. He hears them mumbling, but he doesn’t care to listen. The air smells like Air Salonpas and all he really wants to do is get up and go home and leave this all behind. He thought he left this all behind years ago, but here he is, dragged along by his stupid roommate.

Practice starts, and since Hinata is practically forbidden to leave the gym, Hinata spends the next fifteen minutes dodging Kageyama and his teammates as they run laps around the court. Then, he dodges more when they start serving practice. Hinata would have looked away from all of this, really, he would have ignored it completely, but the thing is, he really likes his face the way it is and doesn’t want to lose a couple front teeth from a rebounding ball, so he’ll be vigilant for now.

About two hours later, Hinata is walking out of the gym with a sweaty Kageyama, still being stared at by the rest of the team and not caring one bit.

“Well, did you get all that you were hoping for, Mr. Setter?” Hinata jests, using his roommate’s position as an annoying nickname. He gets in Kageyama’s face and sticks his tongue out at him. Kageyama grabs his face and pushes him away, but not before Hinata can lick his palm.

“You gross little shit,” Kageyama swears under his breath, wiping his hand on his shorts. “And yes, I did, thank you for asking.”

“Oh yeah? And what were you planning on getting out of this, exactly?” Hinata asks, blinking up at him with what he hopes is an annoyingly-innocent smile on his face. He hopes that it will piss Kageyama off, but the taller boy just smirks at him.

“You were totally interested,” he remarks, taking the lead as they walk back to their building.

“I was not!” Hinata squeaks, and Kageyama chuckles that annoying chuckle of his, and Hinata swears he’s killing him the moment they’re back home.

‘ _Home_ ,’ Hinata thinks again, ‘ _I called it that earlier, too, and it didn’t feel of at all…_ ’

“Yes you were,” Kageyama insists, breaking him out of his little reverie.

“Interested in not getting my face pounded in, maybe!” Hinata says huffily. Kageyama just rolls his eyes at him.

“Well, they want you to come back every time we have practice,” Kageyama says offhandedly, and Hinata balks. “Sorry, I can’t get you out of this one. I can’t disobey my senpai,” he says, completely amused.

Hinata pouts all the way to their room, and the moment the door closes behind them, he pounces on Kageyama’s back and yells every swear word he knows at the raven-haired boy.

Ultimately, Kageyama wins the impromptu wrestling match, but in Hinata’s eyes, it was worth it.

* * *

Hinata can’t get out of attending volleyball practice, no matter what excuse he spouts.

“I have homework, stupid! Do you want me to fail?”

“You can do homework later.”

“It’s boring. I have nothing to do other than sit around and wait for practice to be over.”

“Maybe you should join in.”

“I’m tired, and I really just want to sleep.”

“Go to bed earlier.”

It was a constant battles of wills that Hinata just couldn’t seem to win.

“Hey, idiot, pay attention when I’m calling you,” Kageyama said, bouncing a ball on top of Hinata’s head. Hinata looked up, rubbing the abused spot.

“Can I leave now?” he asks, bored out of his mind and wanting nothing less than to just leave this stupid gym.

“No, stupid. I need you to hit my tosses,” Kageyama says, and before Hinata can argue, he continues. “We have an odd number today, and I need to practice too, so c’mon.”

Hinata glares up at him, and shifts his gaze over the standing boy’s shoulder. There’s about three guys, all tall, all with an expectant look in their eyes. Hinata can’t help but sigh.

“Just this once, asshole, but don’t be mad at me when you don’t get much practicing done due to my mistakes,” Hinata says condescendingly, getting to his feet and looking at his shoes. They weren’t volleyball shoes, but they were running shoes; Hinata learned that wearing them while out with Kageyama was a good idea, seeing how his other pair of sneakers had several holes in them already. He huffed, and nodded to himself. ‘ _They’ll do_ ,’ he thinks to himself.

“Do you remember how to spike?” Kageyama asks, his voice higher than normal, and when Hinata looks, he realizes that he’s making a face at him.

“Yes, I do, nitwit,” Hinata says, walking to the back of the court while Kageyama sets up near the net. Hinata glances around, and he feels the weight of eyes on him, and he’s so nervous that he totally misses the signal Kageyama gives him.

Suddenly, everything slows. Hinata sees the ball above the net, propelled there by Kageyama’s fingers, and he feels himself surge forward. There’s a feeling that’s new, yet familiar at the same time, the same thought running through his mind over and over. ‘ _I have to get to the ball… I have to get to the ball…_ ’ He’s running, and suddenly the net is in front of him, the ball still in the air. He jumps as high as he can, bringing his arms up and-

_SMACK!_

_POW!_

_Thump._

Hinata falls back down to the gym floor, landing on his ass, just as the volleyball smashes down on the other side of the net. He hisses in pain, and notes the distant sensation of his hand stinging, before shooting a glare at Kageyama.

“Asshole! I wasn’t ready!” Hinata whines, clambering to his feet and clenching his fists. Kageyama is staring stupidly at him, jaw slackened and eyes widened, the rest of him the most lax Hinata has seen him in, well, ever.

“One more!” someone says behind Hinata, and he turns just in time to catch the ball that was thrown at him. The person who threw it had a wide, confident smile, his hair was bleached in an odd pattern, and he couldn’t have been much taller than him.

Hinata looks back at Kageyama, who has snapped out of whatever shock he was in, and nods at him. Hinata gives him the ball and goes back to his starting position.

Kageyama tosses. Hinata spikes. And suddenly the whole gym is erupting in a cacophony of shouts, cheers, and encouragements.

“Wh-What…?” Hinata stutters, this time landing successfully on his feet. The people on the team are surrounding him, patting him on the back, ruffling his puffy hair, smiling at him, and Hinata feels like shuffling through them and hiding behind Kageyama’s stupidly tall back. Someone claps him on the shoulder and shakes him a bit, catching his attention. He has short brown hair and kinder, even browner eyes.

“What’s your name, kid?” he asks, and Hinata’s mind goes blank.

“H-Hi-Hinata…” He responds, a second late.

“Well, welcome to the volleyball club, Hinata!” someone else cheers, wrapping him up in a one-armed hug.

Hinata just shoots an unnerved glance at Kageyama, who has an expression that would make anyone think he was giddily planning his next murder scene.

* * *

“You did this! You… You… You _planned_ this, didn’t you?” Hinata screeches, launching himself and Kageyama into another wrestling session the moment they get back to their room. He grabs him by the waist, trying to throw him off balance and force him to the floor.

“I said you had potential, dumbass! What’d you expect?” Kageyama argues back, fighting back as he tries to pry Hinata off him.

“That doesn’t mean you scheme to get me on your stupid team!”  

“That doesn’t mean I sit around and let you waste it, either!”

Hinata grabs for Kageyama’s calf, and lifts his foot off the ground. With a slight push, the two of them tumble to the ground gracelessly, Hinata on top this time. He quickly climbs on top of Kageyama, putting his hands on his shoulders and pinning him there. He knew Kageyama could easily overpowered him, but oddly, he doesn’t.

“I told you I didn’t want to be on a team! Do you ever listen?” Hinata asks.

“But it felt good, right?!” Kageyama yells back at him, leaning upwards and straining against his hands to get in Hinata’s face. Hinata loses his anger in the truth of the setter’s words, and honestly, he doesn’t know if that makes him more upset or just an idiot. “Right? You missed being on the court and spiking tosses and being a part of something bigger!” Kageyama demands when he doesn’t get an answer.

“Yeah,” Hinata mumbles, losing this fight even though he was the one that came out on top. He climbs off Kageyama and sits cross-legged on the floor next to him. He doesn’t meet those cobalt eyes, the ones he knows are burning into him right now.

“You don’t have to miss it anymore. All you have to do is try,” Kageyama says, sitting up and flicking Hinata in the forehead. He gasps, and rubs at the spot.

“Try, try, try, that’s all you ever say! You sound like such a cheeseball! What ever happened to the grouchy I’ll-rip-you-to-shreds-if-you-so-mush-as-look-at-me Kageyama?” Hinata asks, getting up and walking away from him.

“I never wanted to rip anyone to-!” Kageyama is arguing, but he can’t get out his full sentence, because Hinata flops onto his bed and curls up in his blankets. “What the hell are you doing, dumbass?!” he yells.

“Giving you your comeuppance for forcing me on the team,” Hinata says easily, smiling at himself. “I’m sleeping in your bed for a whole week.”

“Like hell you are,” Kageyama says, and in the next second, something heavy and solid falls on top of Hinata’s curled up body.

“Oooow! Kageyama!” Hinata shrieks, struggling to get the taller boy off him.

“Payback,” Kageyama smirks, staying collapsed on top of Hinata and watching him struggle futilely.

* * *

“I thought you were kidding,” the raven haired boy deadpans as he looks down at his bed. Hinata’s already there, dominating at least half of the mattress and completely hogging Kageyama’s pillow and blankets.

“Nope,” Hinata says, smiling up at him innocently. “Good night, Kageyama!”

“You’re so annoying, do you know that?” Kageyama states, not moving from his spot next to his bed, but looking up. He reaches up, and grabs something from Hinata’s bed. The act should be vaguely concerning, but it never crosses his mind. A second later, Kageyama is slipping into bed right next to Hinata, shoving him closer to the wall as he situates _Hinata’s_ pillow under his head and throwing _Hinata’s_ blanket on top of himself.

“What the-?”

“I’m not sleeping in your bed, dumbass. I’m pretty sure it’ll come collapsing down on top of you,” Kageyama says, fussing a little bit until he gets comfortable.

“Aw, you do care,” Hinata coos, before Kageyama’s hand in shoved in his face.

“Go to sleep, dumbass.”

“I think you’re the dumbass here, dumbass.”

“So original. Only from the mouth of Karasuno’s valedictorian.”

“Shut the hell up!”

The two of them fall asleep on Kageyama’s bed, mostly because they were too stubborn to give in and move, but partly because it was warmer this way. (Also, Hinata will never admit that he actually really likes the way Kageyama’s stuff smells, but that’s not a valid point either, so he tries to forget about that little detail as much as he can.)

* * *

After that, things get a lot… easier. Kageyama’s excessive alarms don’t bother Hinata much anymore, and instead, he throws pillows at Kageyama until he wakes up. His mind focuses better after they get back from practice, and he finds himself understanding most of what he’s supposed to be cramming for.

And, he’s getting better at volleyball. His receives still suck, but he loves spiking and blocking, even though he’s too short. And, funnily enough, the rest of the team is really supportive. He’s made some friends, too, like Nishinoya (the guy with the weirdly-bleached hair; he later figures out that the bleached patterns on the sides of his head are lightning bolts, modeled after his “Rolling Thunder” move) and Sawamura (the brown-haired guy that basically keeps everyone in line). There’s others, a _lot_ of others, and Hinata couldn’t be happier.

He was finally on a team that wanted him, and surrounded by people that cared and wanted him to succeed and get better. He finds that the fear that kept him back for so long, the fear of not being supported and good enough, is falling away just as easily as he slams Kageyama’s tosses to the other side of the net.

Hinata doesn’t think that things have changed all that much, especially since he and Kageyama are, well, still themselves. They still argue over stupid things, and they are still stubborn as all hell. There’s still times where Hinata ends up sleeping in Kageyama’s bed because he refused to move and Kageyama refused to acknowledge his presence in his space.

He’s forced to rethink the whole ‘nothing’s changed’ bit, though, suddenly, swiftly, and it usually doesn’t take him long to reach conclusions, but this one smacked him on the back of his head and left him stunned like one of Tanaka’s stray serves (he’s on the team, and Hinata loves him like an older brother, but _man_ , can he hit hard).

One morning, Hinata wakes up to a pressure on his forehead. He squints, and finds Kageyama’s cobalt eyes a little bit too close, open wide in what Hinata thought was shock.

It takes a minute, maybe a minute too long, for Hinata to connect all the dots, but suddenly there’s so many things that he’s aware of, so many things that he should have noticed the moment he woke up: the weight across his waist, the mysterious thing his feet were wrapped around, the object under his cheek that most definitely was not a pillow, the warmth that surrounded him better than any blanket could.

He blinks up at those too-close blue eyes curiously, feeling his own widen slightly at the ridiculous realization that shouldn’t have taken this long in the first place.

“I… It was… Don’t…” Kageyama stutters, or at least tries to stutter. He tries his best to move, to get away, but all Hinata does is move towards him and buries his head in Kageyama’s chest. He hears his hammering heartbeat, and smiles to himself.

“G’morning to you, too,” Hinata mumbles.

* * *

_Fwomp! Thwack! SMACK! Thump._

“Nice kill, Hinata!”

“Awesome, shrimpy!”

“KAGEYAMA!!” Hinata yells, jumping directly at his setter as soon as his feet hit solid ground. Kageyama barely manages to catch him, stumbling backwards a couple steps, and even then it takes Tsukishima’s hands on his shoulders, pushing him slightly, to steady him completely.

“Dumbass! I could have fell! Do you know how hurt you could have gotten if-?” Kageyama grills, before he’s cut off with Hinata’s lips. It’s a small, quick kiss, it’s message simple: ‘ _You talk too much, stupid!_ ’

“Awwwww!!!” Nishinoya coos, running up to the two of them and shaking Kageyama’s arm. “You two are too adorable!”

“I’m not adorable,” Hinata pouts. A hand is placed on his head, and ruffles his hair.

“Yes you are, shrimpy,” Tanaka says, smiling widely. “Especially when you’re like this with Kageyama-kun.”

Kageyama drops Hinata like a hot rock, and he careens to the floor.

“Ow…”

“That was a bit mean, Kageyama,” Nishinoya says, nudging him in the ribs.

“Yeah, you’re not supposed to drop boyfriends, we thought you knew that!” Tanaka said, almost sounding like he was chastising his underclassman.

“Both of you, knock it off! Let’s get back to practice!” Sawamura shouts from the other side of the court, and they snap back to normal in an instant.

* * *

( _Hey, hey, hey! What are you doing? Why is my name-? OH MY GOD, YOU ACTUALLY WROTE IT DOWN? THAT’S SO COOL, ENNOSHITA-SENPAI! I can’t believe you actually did it, I thought you were kidding!_

_Huh? Me? Well, it was pretty crazy… you got everything right, too! That’s crazy!_

_Oh, oh, right, okay, back to the question. I honestly didn’t remember any of you guys… heh, sorry about that. But I never really thought of Kageyama as boyfriend material, but I guess he’s pretty okay._

_Of course I’m happy I got him as my roommate! I’m just glad I didn’t get some creepy weirdo who’s obsessed with something and never talks to anyone!_

_Oh, wait…_

_Well, whatever! Everything’s good now, and I just found out that Kageyama really likes strawberry milkshakes, so I was just about to grab him one!_

_Ennoshita-senpai, stop laughing!)_

**Author's Note:**

> i hope you enjoyed this! thank you for reading!   
> stay safe and have a nice day/night/whatever!


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